The adherent monomicrobial biofilm was washed (3 times), resuspended in 1 ml sterile distilled water and

the biofilm growth was assessed by CFU assay. The experiment was performed two different times with PA56402 using independently prepared bacterial cultures, and one time with PA27853. Both sets of isolates provided similar results. The Cilengitide data were analyzed by paired Student’s t test using GraphPad prism 5.0. The vertical bar on each histogram denotes standard error of the mean for two independent experiments using PA56402. Legends: SD, MDV3100 Sabouraud’s dextrose broth; SD-BS, Sabouraud’s dextrose broth with 10% bovine serum; BHI, Brain Heart Infusion broth; BHI-BS Brain Heart Infusion broth with 10% bovine serum; RPMI, RPMI640; RPMI-BS, RPMI1640 with 10% bovine serum. Effects of various growth media with and without bovine serum on biofilm development One of the primary objectives of this experiment was to identify a simple growth medium in which both A. fumigatus and P. aeruginosa would grow well and methodology for the formation GSK1120212 of monomicrobial and polymicrobial biofilms will be simple for antimicrobial drug susceptibility testing of biofilms. The need

to identify a suitable growth medium for P. aeruginosa biofilm formation was important because in general it produced poor monomicrobial biofilm on plastic surfaces such as polystyrene culture plates. Since pretreatment of certain

plastics with bovine serum preconditions their surfaces for better cell attachment and biofilm production [49, 50], we examined the effect of 10% bovine serum in the growth medium on the formation of P. aeruginosa biofilm. All three media we used were able to support the formation of P. aeruginosa biofilm to varying degree where BHI being the best medium followed by SD broth and RPMI1640 (Figure 3B). A comparison of the CFUs obtained for various media with and without bovine FER serum showed that the presence of 10% bovine serum inhibited P. aeruginosa monomicrobial biofilm formation by 27% in SD (P = 0.0509), 95% in BHI (P = 0.00016) and 89% in RPMI1640 (P = 0.00078) suggesting that bovine serum has a negative effect on P. aeruginosa biofilm formation in Costar cell culture plates. Thus, in our subsequent experiments, we used SD broth for the development of monomicrobial and polymicrobial biofilms of A. fumigatus and P. aeruginosa. The fact that A. fumigatus produces excellent monomicrobial biofilm in SD broth made it a highly suitable medium for the production of polymicrobial biofilms. Biofilm images and quantification Figure 1 shows photomicrographic images of 24-h monomicrobial biofilms of A. fumigatus (A), P. aeruginosa (B) and A. fumigatus-P. aeruginosa polymicrobial biofilm (C) grown on plastic cover slips. A.